Chicken poop ain’t pretty, but it’s potential as an energy source has a number of large-scale poultry operations taking a second look at the smelly stuff. The price tags on such projects can climb pretty high, though: Georgia’s Green Power EMC project, for instance, was projected to cost $20 million when announced in early 2006. These costs may make such projects prohibitive in the developing world, where they could raise living standards of impoverished people while helping them “leapfrog” over Western development patterns based on fossil fuels. South African farmer Shelby Tyne (shown above) believes he’s hit upon the cost-benefit sweet spot for this technology: for $37,000 dollars, Tyne and partner Derrick Hilton have built a biogas plant that powers the entire farm… without even pushing maximum capacity.

Tyne tells the story of the biogas plant in this Facebook video (note: you do have to be a member of Facebook to watch it). His and Hilton’s Greenways Farm had taken chicken poop off of a neighboring farmer’s hands for a number of years to use as fertilizer, but stockpiling the litter created pollution problems. Tyne’s solution: put the poop into methane digesters, and use the resulting gas as fuel for both cooking stoves and a generator. He quickly figured out that with the amount of chicken litter they normally used, the farm could create 11,000 kW h of electricity per month: more than three times what it normally consumed. On paper, the project looked like a no-brainer.

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